From front-line clerks to senior leadership — Preside adds value across the most complex, time-consuming areas of your operations.
Clerks can locate responsive records across thousands of meeting documents in seconds — dramatically reducing the time to compile FOI responses while ensuring nothing is missed.
New senior leaders and CAOs can make sense of complex, multi-report, multi-committee issues — connecting the dots across your city's history to get up to speed and move strategically on the hard problems.
New staff can explore years of institutional knowledge through natural conversation — understanding precedents, processes, and decisions without relying solely on colleagues' memory.
Prepare for upcoming meetings by instantly surfacing the background, past decisions, and staff recommendations on every agenda item — saving hours of manual document review.
Policy analysts and planners can trace the history of a topic — zoning changes, budget allocations, bylaw amendments — across years of committee and Council proceedings in one conversation.
Staff preparing reports for Council or Committee can instantly pull relevant precedents, past decisions, and supporting data from across the knowledge base — producing thorough, well-grounded reports in a fraction of the time.
Your most critical staff spend the majority of their time retrieving and synthesizing information — not making decisions.
1.8 hrs/day
spent by knowledge workers searching for information
McKinsey Global Institute, 2012
19.8%
of business time — nearly one day per week — lost to search
McKinsey Global Institute, 2012
12–16 days
average time to fulfill a single Freedom of Information request
IPC Ontario, 2022–2024
51%
of clerk working hours spent supporting information requests
AMCTO Workforce Survey, 2023
Estimated Annual Value
$342K
for a municipality with 100–300 staff
$8.72M
for a municipality with 6,000–20,000 staff
Your most critical people — clerks, policy analysts, managers, and senior leadership — spend less time retrieving information and more time making decisions and moving files forward.
Preside decreases the latency of government decision-making.
Includes detailed use case breakdowns, city-size estimates, and adoption models
Real examples of complex, multi-committee queries — with grounded answers and source citations you can verify.
Has Council approved any changes to the community improvement plan for affordable housing since 2023? What incentives are currently available?
Yes. Council has amended the Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan (CIP) twice since 2023, expanding the available incentives 13.
September 2023 — Tax Increment Grant expansion:
- Planning Committee received a staff report recommending the tax increment grant be extended from 10 years to 20 years for projects that include a minimum 25% affordable units 1. The motion carried 4-1 at committee and was adopted by Council on October 3, 2023 2.
March 2024 — New development charge deferrals:
- A staff report to the Finance Committee proposed a 3-year development charge deferral for purpose-built rental projects with rents at or below 80% of CMHC average market rent 3. Council approved the amendment 12-3 on April 9, 2024, with an annual cap of $2.4M in deferred charges across all qualifying applications 4.
Currently available incentives under the CIP include the 20-year tax increment grant, the DC deferral program, a façade improvement grant (up to $20,000), and a brownfield tax assistance program for contaminated sites 13.
Planning Committee — Staff Report (2023-09-11)
Council — Minutes (2023-10-03)
Finance Committee — Staff Report (2024-03-18)
Council — Minutes (2024-04-09)
AI-powered conversational search for your system of council and corporate record. Here's what happens under the hood.
Ask questions in plain English and get answers drawn from agendas, minutes, policies, staff reports, and bylaws, all with citations to the source documents.
Every answer is grounded in the original documents. View the retrieved passage side by side with the AI-generated answer so you can verify that every claim traces back to the source.
An understanding of how your municipal government operates is built directly into the system. Preside knows your organizational structure, committees, and bylaws, and factors that context into every answer it generates.
Purpose-built to understand the structure and language of municipal documents including minutes, agendas, bylaws, policies, and staff reports. Preserves the relationships between motions, decisions, and recommendations.
Ingests from council management applications, SharePoint folders, meeting portals, and other operational databases, stitching every source into a single, searchable knowledge layer that your system of intelligence sits on top of.
No need to categorize, tag, or build a taxonomy. The AI understands the meaning and context of your content, linking related documents, decisions, and data together automatically. If your records are digital, you’re already AI ready.
Access your system of intelligence directly from Microsoft Teams. Ask questions, get cited answers, and share insights without leaving the tools your team already uses every day.
Goes beyond meeting documents with configurable access to official plans, strategic plans, and white-listed canonical sources like provincial and federal legislation to build a complete system of intelligence.
Combines semantic vector search with traditional keyword matching to find meaning-similar content as well as exact terms, dates, and bylaw numbers.
State-of-the-art table extraction reads complex budget tables, vote tallies, multi-column schedules, and financial statements, turning structured data into queryable knowledge.
Charts, graphs, diagrams, and images embedded in staff reports and policies directly inform the intelligence layer. Visual data is fully searchable and can be cited in answers.
Beyond conversational AI, Preside enriches your document library by automatically extracting entities, building knowledge graphs, and generating keyword indexes. Your existing search and retrieval workflows become dramatically more powerful.
Built on industry-standard information security practices. OTP authentication ties directly to your corporate domain accounts, adding no new credentials or threat surface. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is scoped to authorized staff, and your documents are never used to train models.
Built-in safeguards constrain the AI to your verified corpus, clearly distinguish official positions from public comments, and flag knowledge-base limitations.
Book a demo and we'll walk you through how Preside works with your documents, your systems, and your team.